


The Screen

by Whatho



Category: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-21
Updated: 2010-07-21
Packaged: 2017-10-10 17:18:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/102177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whatho/pseuds/Whatho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set between Charlie's refusal to come to the factory and the Dr Wilbur business, when Willy's feeling not so hot. It's like a shorter, shoddier version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, except not quite. Did I sell it well?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Screen

Hey, look. A man in a purple jacket. A bald guy cracking bad puns about gloves. A pirate eating an apple.

He leaned hard on the volume control and let the pirate hold the floor. The little white chair creaked as he flexed and pressed himself into the cushions. Remote control at his right hand, cocoa at his left. So he found he was at home in the TV room. So what? No other way to conjure a pirate into his factory. He dabbled in each of his four deadly sins, then he wrapped 'em up and he handed 'em out. Chocolate for the gluttons. Contests for the competitive. Gum, by gum, for the gum chewing crowd. And...gee, that pirate was loud, but he couldn't drown out the mumbling kid. _If you hate chewing gum so much, why do you make it in your factory? Nyah, nyah, nyah_. He waggled his head to the whine in his ears. _And why do you have a TV? And why...._

'Because, because, because, because', he said out loud, giving the remote a fresh prod for every word. _And I'm chewing gum_. 'What are _you_ going to do about it?' Yeah. He chewed gum and he ate chocolate and he spoiled himself beyond belief. That was okay. He was no Charlie. He always got what was coming to him.

Wonka never told the narrator what he'd seen, or what he'd heard. The voice had been following him since childhood: Halloween, his first taste of chocolate, the day the house disappeared. The day of the tour, the blessed thing had never let up. It even trespassed on his flashbacks. He tracked it to a lost room at the back of the factory, a room he never knew he owned. An Oompa Loompa sat with his back to the door, reading out loud from a script in somebody else's voice.

'Hmmm,' mumbled his own voice at the back of Wonka's head. 'It would seem I'm a sin. I am the fourth deadly sin. I know I keep the other three hanging around. And I do indulge. Like…I sell gum. And I eat gum. But I, _personally_, am not a stick of gum. Do you see? Maybe I did kind of say I was eatable, but I specifically told them it was wrong to eat me. And I told them not to watch TV. Only…I was on the screen when I said it. Okay. Well. There you go.'

And he raised a sculpted eyebrow, pivoted on his heel and strolled away with a casual twirl of his cane. But the shudder that racked him from his shoulders to his gut…well, if you held an old book by the spine and shook it till all the loose pages fell out and fluttered to the floor? Uh-huh. That's what it felt like.

He'd barely set foot outside the television room since.

A man morphing into a man with weird teeth. A thousand spaceships circling the Earth. A goose that laid a golden egg. Hey. Look at that.

 

*

 

On the corner of his desk was a book. A 1950s paperback. It arrived on the morning of the factory tour, spilling seductively out of its plain brown wrapper. Goodness knows how it got there. But it wasn't his book and it didn't belong in his office. It hadn't been sliced in two. That's probably why he noticed it. That and the title.

He settled down – or half of him did - and read the book from cover to cover. It must've been quite a story. Ten minutes in, he laughed, gently, and rubbed a forefinger back and forth across his lips. He was nodding, five pages on, his whole upper body rocking in agreement. A knock at the door. He picked up a half-eaten apple and waved the Oompa Loompa away. The crowds were gathering outside the gates but he had little or no problem with leaving them waiting in the snow. His mouth was watering as he snatched half a pen off the desk and scribbled furiously on his wrist. The hands of the clock tumbled over to the missing side of the face and marked off an unreadable number of minutes. Still he read on.

Finally he turned the final page. He ran his tongue along his teeth and balanced the book on the sawn-off edge of his desk. His shining eyes were smiling. Taking up his cane, he shot back the bolt and tripped along the corridor. Ten feet from the main entrance, he shoved his left hand in his purple jacket pocket to brace an aching hip, nodded to the doorman and limped painfully into the sunlight. It wasn't in the book, but he kind of felt it was going that way.

 

*

 

A policeman playing an electric guitar on the roof of Buckingham Palace. A respotted black in the final frame. The man in the purple jacket again.

He'd never seen the purple-jacket-man thing all the way through. It was on all the time, every Christmas at least, but he'd only caught the odd scene before. The weird little guys with the green hair and the orange faces tended to scare him off. He was comfortable today. He let it run.

Most of the people in it mumbled quite a lot and it was, say, two thirds of the way in already, but he reckoned he was pretty much getting the gist of it. It was set in a factory and there were these colourful polystyrene shapes that the purple jacket guy said was candy and there were these kids with names that were kind of familiar but he wasn't really very big on names and they were like totally horrendous but that was okay 'cause they got what was coming to them and the little green and orange people dragged them off and sang this seriously annoying song that went oompa-loompa-doom-pity-something and the little boy won and the purple jacket guy took him and his Grandpa away in a Great Glass Elevator and the little boy hugged him and called him Mr Wonka and then a bunch of eunuchs started to sing some mush about looking at paradise or something. And that's basically how it went.

He propped his head on his fist and waited till the credits rolled away and the date flashed up. 1971. He threw the remote to the floor. It skated into the far corner.

Great. So he wasn't just in a movie. He was in a remake.

 

*

 

Well, this scene wasn't scripted anyway. You seldom get toilet scenes in kids' books, and never in kids' movies. It felt good to deviate. The remnants of his own kids were waiting in a corridor, watching the Oompa Loompas' Veruca Salt routine. Ha. That was a good 'un. And Mike was the next to go. He smiled to himself in the mirror above the sink.

'I don't understand it. The children are disappearing like rabbits. Well, we still have each other. Shall we press on?'

He swept them down the hallway and rolled along in their wake. He was only vaguely aware of the million or so particles of something camp and velvety swarming past his left ear. He turned as they began to knot together.

 

*

 

The inch-thick layer of snow on his topper suggested that the man had been standing by the shack, three degrees below, all through that bitter afternoon. His right hand grasped the stovepipe for the warmth. The left was locked tight around the top of his cane. _The little boy had hugged him_. Wonka rubbed the brim of his hat ponderously back and forth along the ragged timbers. Mrs Bucket was humming over the gravy. _After he said the family could come along. It didn't seem to bother him. The family coming along_. Wonka's brow wrinkled a touch. He pressed his blistered palm into the heat.

A cheerily slammed door snapped him out of his stupor. Charlie was home. Wonka peeled himself away from the wall, leaving a mess of molten lilac latex on the pipe. The window frame split his face right down the middle. He gazed one-eyed into the heart of the family. He saw Charlie throw down his satchel in the doorway, run to the bed and kiss each of the old people in turn. Ew. They reached their wrinkled hands up to clasp his tousled head and chafe his frozen cheeks back to life. Then the boy straightened and disappeared for a long quiet minute into the depths of his parents' arms.

Wonka stared on, a mild, kind of a distant smile on his lips, one curious eyebrow cocked skywards. Charlie hadn't come across as a demonstrative child at the factory. He noticed stuff. Like, when a guy recoiled if a charmless brat threw her arms around his waist. This Charlie knew whom not to hug. That wasn't the difference. The difference, then, must lie within himself. It was between him and the Wonka who didn't have a father, and didn't seem to know he was a sin.

That was the life.

Wonka couldn't see any more. His breath had fogged the window.

 

*

 

Nobody in the group turned. _They'll edit this scene out anyway_, he thought. It wasn't in the book and it wouldn't add much to the film.

The last few particles drifted down on the brim of a black top hat. The top hat rested atop an unnervingly perfect bob. The bob framed a nauseatingly pale face set with a gleaming, buck-toothed grin. The coat was red. The shoes were shining. The gloves were purple latex.

 

*

 

A bald, Yorkshire-accented Frenchman sipping his hot Earl Grey tea. A cute little blond Russian guy in a wacky sixties spy show. And...ah. There he was. The man in the purple jacket. Wonka grabbed his cane and bounced to the top of the podium. Just wait for the Oompa Loompas to move along, nothing to see here. Wouldn't want to beam into the middle of that lot. Ew.

Technically, the journey shouldn't have been any sort of a ride. All the cells that thought and felt were marking time in empty air. Synapses fired and hit absolutely nothing. So he couldn't understand why he could still sort of...sense stuff. Then he realised he was capable of not understanding, and that totally freaked him out. Then he got the most tremendous sense of being infinitely tall and wide and his mind began to wander. All over the place. Every thought stretched long and taut and twangable. He twanged them, every one. Every niggling pain was spread so thin he couldn't sense it. But he could see everything. His birth. The back of his head. Pure undiluted anger. The perfect form of beauty. The perfect form of Tables. Guatemala. Scunthorpe. His father's face flashed briefly by.

Wonka bared his teeth and whimpered like a puppy.

As his senses closed down and the light faded to a sensible pitch, a wall and a room and a man phased slowly into view. Wild hair, a red top hat. A long purple jacket. He cocked his head on one side, like a robin. It was a question.

The guests, thank goodness, had noticed nothing. They strolled along the corridor scanning every speck of wall for further signs of weirdness. Wonka sighed, wiped a clinging glove across his brow and nodded at the blond boy's retreating back.

'Wonka. I'm Wonka,' he said. 'And I don't think much of yours.'

'Wait for me in the chocolate room,' said Wonka. 'That way.'

They bowed to one another and scarpered.

 

*

 

The chocolate didn't even looked like chocolate. It looked like filthy water. It wasn't in a world of its own, thought Wonka, brushing the soles of his shoes across the muddy surface of the river, casting a lazy, sweeping gaze across the technicoloured meadow, the corrugated iron roof and the leaded warehouse windows. He sniffed and stabbed a polystyrene mushroom with his cane. The base of the thing was riddled with holes from previous attempts – previous takes, at a guess. You could barely make out the walls in his own chocolate room; there were certainly no windows. It was like a void, kind of. There might have been nothing in the world but his chocolate room. But you could see the sky from this place, and the clouds and the chimneys and door by which he'd entered. Very seventies altogether.

He'd only been away half an hour and already he wanted out.

'Well, hello.'

Wonka choked and dropped the mushroom in the river. He drew his lips back, dragged his feet from the muck and stood to attention on the bank. The man tipped his hat politely.

'You look nervous,' he said.

'I....' said Wonka, and fumbled in his pocket for the cue cards.

'You must have come a long way.'

The cue cards fell from his trembling hands and scattered themselves gracelessly across the floor. Wonka dropped to his knees. The other Wonka gazed benignly down at the mess and didn't offer to help.

'You came via Wonkavision.'

'2005. Yeah,' he said, rising, coughing up his voice from somewhere in his bowels. 'Damned Oompa Loompa. It must have changed the channel. I was aiming for that spy thing with the pretty little Russian guy.'

'You went in there on purpose?' He raised his eyebrows and sucked his teeth. 'You do know you can't get back; not unless you want to be stretched out of all recognition.'

'Well…yeah. But it didn't seem like too much of a hardship at the time.'

Wonka nodded once and flipped an overlooked cue card into the air with the tip of his cane.

'So. Have you seen this movie too?'

'I keep my TV on static. I like static.'

'Yeah? Then how come you're not totally weirded out? And how come you even believe me?'

'Well, some kind soul sent me a copy of the book. Some...malicious, malicious person.' He smiled a smile that lit a manic fire behind his eyes. 'And you're patently a Wonka of some description. I suppose there could be any number of us.'

'The book?'

'It was a book. You didn't know that?'

'So I'm a remake of an adaptation of a book?'

'Mind-blowing, isn't it? Why are you here?'

'Oh.' Wonka blinked until his mind came back to him, then pasted on his toothiest and most engaging smile. 'Oh yes. I came to live with you.'

'How charming.'

'They gave me a hideous backstory. I have an evil dentist f-f-father.

'Do you need a drink?'

'No, thank you. He made me wear a brace and he wouldn't let me eat candy.'

'How tragic!'

'I felt I would ultimately be happier here, in this bountiful paradise, where Willy Wonka has no past.'

'So sensible.'

'Though I have to say your sets are appallingly gaudy.'

'And forthright.'

'And your hair is totally revolting.'

'Delighted. I can give you ten minutes, then I want you out of here. I can't have a gentleman like you hanging around my boy.'

'You're the one who messes with their hair.'

'Oh,' said Wonka, and raised his eyebrows to his hairline. 'Did they leave that bit in?'

'I didn't want to stay anyway. I told you. I'm chasing a little Russian guy.'

'You contradict yourself terribly, dear boy. You ought to read the script.'

'How do I get back?'

'You step through the screen. Then you shrink. Then you get stretched till you snap. But you can't stay here. I know how this film's supposed to end and it isn't going to end that way till you're gone.'

'Could I mess it up?'

'I think you could.'

'Because I've seen that ending and it is really is worth losing. What..what d'you think would happen if I got myself into my own movie just before that scene where I find the narrator, then the other me won't ever see the narrator and I won't go into your movie and everything's going to be just hunky-dory. Would that work?'

'Possibly,' said Wonka and flashed him an unsettlingly bland grin. 'Why don't you try?'

'Or might it just cause a bit of a paradox thing?'

'Probably,' said Wonka, with a broader, blander grin. 'And did you learn that off the television?'

'Have I messed your movie up yet?'

'I don't know,' said Wonka. 'I don't know what you've done. I mean, if we're doing this from your point of view, this is...2005? And my movie finished 34 years ago. Yet Charlie's still a boy. So what did you do? Did you suck me out of my future? Is that what happens every time somebody plays my movie? Every time somebody plays your movie?'

'Do you remember...stuff that's going to happen?'

He shook his head.

'Did I do that?'

'Well...' He leaned on his cane and gazed fondly around the chocolate room that to the future Wonka was patently a set in a warehouse. 'To me...it just seems like it hasn't happened yet. It's unwritten. Maybe you turned the pages back. I don't know.'

He speared a candied apple off a nearby tree and offered it to Wonka. Wonka declined. You could've eaten the bark too in his version of the chocolate room. Seventies Wonka dipped the apple in the chocolate river. Luckily, it fell off. He spun back and jabbed the other in the chest with the end of his cane. It hurt. Like sin.

'Who are you anyway?' he said with a shrug. 'Did Willy Wonka 2005 just walk out of every version of his movie's future and into every version of my movie's future? Or did you just step out of one screening? Or out the head of one person who was at that screening?'

'I'm a sin,' said Wonka.

Wonka nodded. 'You do resemble a sin. But so what? You don't get the grand prize. So. What else is different in your movie? Ah. My hair is more revolting. I know that bit already.'

'I said that first.'

'And the backstory. What else?'

'Can I lie down?' he said, and did.

He couldn't rise at the end. Wonka hadn't said a word through the synopsis. He sat on a pumpkin, his chin propped on his folded hands, his hands propped on his cane.

'Can I try something a minute?' he mumbled.

'Why, of course,' said Wonka, and prised himself out of the grass.

'Good. Come here. It's just an experiment. Please don't think it's any more than that.'

He raised his eyebrows and took a dainty step forward. Something bore down on him, but his sudden flinch was not enough to prevent Wonka's left arm from winding around his back, the gloveless palm coming to rest on a corded velvet shoulder-blade. A hand came up beneath the heavy curtain of hair and gently tugged till his face nestled awkwardly in the folds of Wonka's collar. The bare fingers pressed briefly against the nape of his neck. He stiffened under the touch and screwed up his face like he was awaiting an assault from a nuclear wind. Nothing came. The man released him. The rushing sound fell away from his ears.

Wonka was smiling. 'What did you think was going to happen?'

He didn't answer. His lip trembled.

'Did you think we'd die?'

'Yeah...that was kind of what I'd...hoped.'

The smile flicked briefly into a mocking grin. 'You know, I rather thought it too. But you think that's going to happen if anybody touches you.' And he pivoted neatly away, twirling the cane like a baton. 'We're neither of us much like the guy in the book, you know.' He spun back. Wonka leaned away from him. 'Would you like to borrow it?'

'No. Thank you.'

'Look...if it's any comfort, the book advocates TV in moderation. Kids can't do moderation. That's all.'

'Oh. Well. Then I should be fine,' said Wonka, and did a weird little dance with his head.

'Ten minutes is up. I have to get to back to my office.'

'Yeah. I was thinking. If I'd waited till the movie actually came out...or even finished...I could've brought a pirated DVD with me. And a little tiny DVD player. We could've plugged it into your TV set and I could've beamed right back into my movie. Or, like, you know, a version of my movie. I would've been at, like, two extra removes from reality, but hey. I think I was in that scene where....'

'Just step through the screen, Mr Wonka.'

'I don't want to be stretched out of shape like that freaky bendy Teavee kid.'

'I was lying. You just have to make sure the Oompa Loompas don't get carried away, then you eat that chocolate with the vitamins in to fatten you up again. I picked up a sample. Fresh made today. You wouldn't know about if you haven't read the book. Here.'

He took it.

'Dissect it. Disassemble it. Read the parts; make up your own.'

He turned the bar over and over in his shiny hands, and jerked his head up like a pigeon.

'Did you lie about that because you get a kick out of it?'

Wonka flashed his teeth and whistled the last two phrases of 'The Candyman.'

'I have to get the kid back to the factory?'

'I think so. That happens in the book and it's going to happen here.'

'Your Charlie has no...Mr Bucket?'

'That's right. It was an eminently cuttable role.'

'Lucky kid. Do you have to do that for him now?'

Wonka nodded.

'I don't have to do that.'

Wonka shook his head.

'Okay. I'm going.'

He could still feel Wonka's touch on the back of his neck. He guessed the guy was going to be pretty decent at the whole f-father thing. Decent or creepy. But he didn't know much about that.

 

*

 

The stretching went just fine. His version of the vitamin chocolate bar was perfect. He took clear notes of all his measurements, pinned them to the recipe and left them in the TV room with a trusted Oompa Loompa and a boat hook.

He scuffed up his shoes and walked out into the snow.

 

*

 

_Epilogue_.

 

A soaring voice at a concert in Central Park. A couple of guys chasing an errant plank. A woman sandwiched in the back seat of a car between Cary Grant and David Niven.

Charlie put his head round the door. Wonka yelped and jabbed feverishly at the remote.

'Have you moved into this room or something?'

'It's late. There are certain channels that little boys are not allowed to watch.'

'Oh my....' said Charlie. 'What were you doing?'

'Nothing. Go away. Don't tell your parents. Well...ask them if they like David McCallum. If they say yes, they can come too.'

'David who?'

'David Whom. Come back when you know grammar.'

He turned in the doorway, his hand on the button. 'The Oompa Loompa put your line in, by the way. Life had never been sweeter.'

'Thank you.'

The boy nodded and left. Eh. It had to be better than 'happily ever after.'

A guy in a purple jacket. A group of twenties layabouts playing indoor cricket with bread rolls. A cute little Russian, strung up to the rafters, being abused by a girl with a cattle prod.

'That's the one.'

Bring chocolate.


End file.
